This is a marvellous new coffee table style volume that looks at some of the world’s oldest structures: the ancient stone rings of the British Isles. Compiled by Aubrey Burl, the foremost authority on prehistoric megalithic sites, the easy to read text is brought to life by the luxuriant and sympathetic photography of Max Milligan. Divided into three sections, it opens with the circles of the late neolithic period of c.3,200BC-2,500BC, before arriving at the more familiar early Bronze Age monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury, which are contemporaneous with the great pyramids of the Giza Plateau in Egypt. The final section deals with the relatively late examples dating from the early to middle Bronze Age.
    Over the centuries, generations of antiquarians have speculated on how these monuments were constructed, by whom and for what purpose. Of course, many of these men were also Freemasons, such as the Rev William Stukeley, yet, despite the quantum advance in science since Stukeley’s day, the questions remain. Why should ancient man go to so much trouble? Perhaps he wanted the challenge to make him grow. Perhaps the colossal effort was his act of contrition, where value was his chief concern, not merely price. Today in our cynical age of superconductors and genetic cloning, we build ostensibly for function and utility, and yet, in spite of the lure and grip of mammon, we are still in love with civilisations that erected awe-inspiring monuments to mark their sacred places. As WH Auden wrote:

To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral…
Are the works of the same Old Man,
Under different names: we know what He did,
What, even, He thought He thought,
But we don’t see why.